LONDON IMMIGRANTS AND EMIGRANTS 117
an estate in the country. Many parish children were bound apprentices
to masters outside London or to the sea service. There was a constant
flow outwards as well as inwards. The high death-rate among London
children meant a low physique among the survivors and country people
were necessary for heavy manual labour, while the better education in
Scotland and the north of England made boys from the north in request
for shops and offices.3 There was a conviction that the London poor
were vicious and dishonest and consequently there was a great demand
for domestic servants - then a far larger proportion of the community
than they afterwards became - from the country. London was naturally
the favourite place of resort for the beggars and vagrants who were so
largely a product of the vagrancy and settlement laws.
If any person is born with any defect or deformity [it was said about 1730] or
maimed by fire or other casualty, or any inveterate distemper which renders
them miserable objects, their way is open to London, where they have free
liberty of showing their nauseous sights to terrify people, and force them to
give mon*y to get rid of them; and these vagrants have for'many years past
been moved out of several parts of these kingdoms and taken their stations
in this metropolis, to the interruption of conversation and business.4
London attracted the best and the worst, the enterprising and die
parasitic classes, and the tendency of the poor laws was to reduce the
seeker for work to the tramping vagrant
In so large and constant a supply of country people, there must unavoidably
be a number of men and women who cannot get speedy employment or are
seduced by artful practices into evil courses of life; there certainly ought to be
some better provision made than that of sending them back to their parishes
... with a pass.... When both law and justice have thus given a sanction to
begging it is very natural for a poor man or woman to take up the trade of a
strolling beggar who would not otherwise have done it.2
Besides the internal reasons for migration to the metropolis, London
then to some extent took the place now taken by the United States as
the obvious resort of those driven out of their own countries by
economic or political pressure. Apart from the French Huguenots who
settled in Spitalfields and Soho at the end of the seventeenth century,
this applies more particularly to the Irish and to the Polish Jews who
found their way in large numbers to London. Though there was